mickthemaverick wrote: 29 Jul 2023, 12:04
Purely for information that Vic20 made £90 + fees!!
Doesn't surprise me! Anything with a Commodore badge seems to go crazy these days.
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A couple of packages arrived at the end of last week.
Carb rebuild kit for the Rover.
Also the last couple of bits I'd been waiting on for the head gasket job on the Renault are now here. The timing belt kit is already in the boot. So I *think* I now have everything I need for that.
It meant this was time to get stuck into cleaning up the Rover's carb. Ten minutes later...
One extracted carb.
My suspicion that the innards were likely to be as grubby as the float bowl was pretty quickly proven to be correct.
That's about a third of what I dug out of there before it was dumped into the ultrasonic cleaner then left it to stew for half an hour.
I also discovered that the diaphragm was shot. I couldn't see any actual cracks all the way through, but it was definitely perished and had basically turned to plastic. Hard to see the perishing in the photo, but it was definitely there.
Beyond this point I was covered in carb cleaner etc so no further photos. However it basically consisted of removing all of the major parts of the carb and then putting it together again. I decided not to disturb the throttle shaft at this point, nor replace the needle/seat. My logic here was simple: That until the cold start control physically stuck and resulted in me likely pulling a load of crud out the bottom of the tank, it was running the engine absolutely fine. Visual examination of the needle showed no visible wear or damage at all. There is a tiny bit of play in the throttle shaft, so long term I will probably change it. Right now however I'm not throwing more variables into the mix. I know with the carb clean, it should go back to being fine. I might go back in and finish the rebuild at a later date - when I'm not in a situation where I have only 2/5 cars working!
A little disappointingly the carb to manifold gasket supplied with the kit from SU isn't correct as it lacks the cutout for the slow running air passage. Luckily I still had one in stock from when I bought the head gasket kit.
With everything back together I set about trying to dial things in. For what felt like forever. I just couldn't get the engine to idle smoothly no matter what I did with the mixture adjustment. It would clear up around 1000rpm or so, but below that would just get really stumbly. Until I took about 10 degrees of timing out. At which point she immediately returned to a more or less smooth idle. Not quite as smooth as it used to be, but I was clearly in the right ball park.
I'm not sure if the distributor had crept out of adjustment (the clamp wasn't massively tight) or what had happened there, as I'd not touched the timing in a long while.
Anyhow, with that set more sensibly I set about trying to find tune things a bit. While working largely by ear, I figured I may as well use the equipment I had to help see what I was doing.
That seemed to be where she was happiest. Not entirely sure that gauge reads accurately with modern fuels, but it was at least a help in terms of making sure I was adjusting things in the direction I thought I was.
Still waiting for the point where connecting things up this way around stops feeling really odd.
I had a helper for a good portion of the tuning process.
Must have been a good 15 or 20 minutes they stuck around.
The wiring on the nearside of the engine bay had shed a fair chunk of the outer cloth loom covering at one point and it was blowing around ridiculously in the airflow from the fan. So I set about tidying that up a bit.
Bit tidier at least.
On a similar note I noticed that the wiring loom down to the generator was rubbing against the brake servo at higher revs due to the airflow from the fan making it flap around at one spot so secured that in place so it no longer moves around.
A test run revealed things to be pretty close to back to normal. The throttle linkage needed a slight tweak as it was hanging up a little. I didn't realise you needed to preload it slightly because of how several springs act against each other.
The only thing I hadn't refitted prior to the test run was the intake silencer. Now I can fully appreciate why Rover fitted it, but equally I kind of wish they hadn't. Without it the car is plenty quiet and refined under most circumstances, but there is a truly gorgeous howl anywhere above about 3/4 throttle at any real revs.
I would like to get a paper element fuel filter installed between the sediment bowl and the carb, just to capture the smaller particles which can (evidently) get through the strainer. Though I'll need to acquire some fittings to do that as it's an armoured nylon line with crimped on fittings, so not just a matter of splicing in a bit of hose as on many cars.
Over the last few days I've been using the car quite a bit and am pleased to report that it seems to be back to its usual self. Don't think the idle is *quite* as smooth as it was, but it's close. I'll read the plugs again once we've got a couple of hundred miles covered.
TPA was out and about for yesterday's errands.
A decision I was quite thankful for given that I got stuck in an absolute stinker of a traffic jam on the way home. Which would have been way more tiresome in any of my other cars.
The only thing I did today was to tame my inner hooligan and refit the intake silencer on the Rover.
Which is of course absolute concrete insurance that I'm going to want to get to something that it's in the way of within the next 48 hours.
I did pick up a distraction a couple of days ago from a neighbour.
This is a 1942 era short wave radio receiver made by National, including the power supply and a full set of tuning coils.
This was otherwise going to be destined for the recycling bin...so suffice to say I wasn't going to turn it down. It looks to be in decent shape at least at first glance
Will obviously need all the wax paper caps like this one replaced though.
I'm expecting this to be relatively simple though, these were pretty well made units so new set of caps and it will likely wake back up as though it was put away yesterday. Should be interesting anyway.
